What is Forgiveness

Good morning all-

An interesting day. So many things, great and small.

I had so much fun seeing L and D staff and Ob/Gyns at the Christmas party yesterday. That is the longest I have been out or stood up in two weeks, except for dialysis. It was a great blessing to talk with others, and eat with others. 

The laws of motion as applied to dialysis did take effect, however. I had three slices of ham which was sugar coated. Well, I'm sure it wasn't sugar cured, because I spent the rest of the day bloated, edemetous and tired. That ham  had more sodium in it than probably a day's worth of what I'm supposed to eat, and boy am I sensitive to it.

I'm still getting used to the sounds and feel of my own insides, but they appear to be hurting less, and I'm glad. I can't tell if I have an incisional hernia in one of the trocar sites or a big hematoma. If it's a hernia, I surely want it fixed while they do the transplant.

Aside from ham, I've eaten both better and more, so that I am not absolutely wracked by hunger pain at 4:00 AM. The renal diet is mainly a matter of two things. First, almost every processed and commercial food is a no-no. They contain sodium, lots of potassium in peanuts and chocolate, phosphorous and potatoes. So all chips, soft drinks, some bottled waters, most candy bars, are all verboten. Going into a convenience store is like looking at a rack of metabolic poisons. Oranges, tangerines and grapefruit are also dangerous. On the other hand, I can have pears and apples to my heart's content, and most grapes and berries. How unhappy can you be eating a pint of blueberries in December? I can have white fish, chicken and turkey. While some of my favorite hot cereals are out, like cream of wheat and oats, rice based cereals are just fine. Here my taste for children's cereals gets to be indulged- Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a great renal food!

So the second issue in the renal diet is one of frame. If ll I look at is what I can't have, then all I am is disappointed. If I think about creative ways to enjoy what I can have, then I am satisfied.

How we frame problems makes such a difference in how we approach them. Some of you have heard me say that the more variables we fix in a multi-variate situation, the fewer solutions can be considered. When we frame our experiences as our losses, our limitations, etc, we suffer. When we frame them as the chance for growth and improvement, we do just that.

Lying in a hospital bed vomiting up the lining of my intestines, not having slept in 36 hours and being unable to stand or walk without major assistance was a very unpleasant experience. Looked at another way, it is trivial. It was a couple of days out of my life, and it is the gateway to longer and better life. So, if you asked me up front to spend a couple of days like that in the hospital and then just go home, I would dread it and refuse. If, however, you told me I could live again, and better, and that my body image and well-being would be restored at the cost of a couple of days of feeling bad, I would gladly accept.

I feel this way about life in general. I forget who described life as violent, brutish and short. Well, with an attitude like that, I do not have to ask how that person felt about their daily existence and death. But what about what we learn, about ourselves, and others? What about a larger frame on life's admitted pains and losses?

Being an obstetrician has led me to compare birth with death. When viewed from the frame of the fetus, birth must surely be like death is to us. The fetus is taken from the only environment it knows, in which all its needs are met through an umbilical cord which ties it intimately to its mother. It is brought into a loud, bright, dry world through a process of being squeezed to the point of strangulation. It then finds itself using organs it did not even know it had- lungs, eyes, vocal cords. The cries of the fetus are not those of the happy baby exercising tis lungs; they are the screams of fear of a sentient creature suddenly brought into an alien world. If any of us were so suddenly state transformed, we would scream too.

And yet, none of us would say that fetal life is better than life in the 'real' world as we know it. That suffering and fear is the gateway to a greater and richer physical life.

Just so with death. We orient ourselves to a worldly plane, so that death is a passing and loss, and feared. But we have overwhelming evidence of spiritual perpetuation after death. Just as the fetus receives glimmers of its future existence from hearing its mother's heart beat, or hearing noises transmitted through the abdominal wall, so we have ample glimmers of a spiritual existence after death. What if our bodies, which we spend so much time feeding, gratifying and decorating, are as irrelevant to our future existence as the placenta is to the extra-uterine life of the fetus? We view bodily death as a loss, but it may be no more relevant than the shedding of the placenta is at birth.

And so, the frame in which we view life and its vagaries makes all the difference. If we are oriented only to flesh, then we fear death and gratify our bodies. If we are oriented to the spiritual world around us, death is merely a transformation. 

In thinking of these things, I have always been reminded of Jesus' words in front of Pilate. I have no kingdom in this world, you have no power over me except as it has been given to you, what have I done to offend anyone. 

The Gnostics believed all people had a spark of the divine within them, and it was their duty to try and feed and fan that spark. They felt that within Jesus there was a tremendous realization fot eh divine, more in the docetic tradition than in the tradition carried forward in the Nicene Creed. They felt jesus was not a personal savior but someone to be emulated through spiritual transformation and worldly abnegation.

We certainly get a different type of spiritual focus if, instead of relying on an intermediary to 'get us to God' we make an effort of guided self transformation. The light is in all of us; we have to find it. Then the little variations of the world are not so important.

On my way to cooking breakfast,

Ted